A study suggests that growing prosperity in China coupled with expected future global warming will drive an explosion in Chinese electricity Demand.

Climate Change Could Ramp Up Electricity Use in China

By Roni Dengler | January 2, 2019 1:41 pm

As the Earth heats up thanks to climate change, people are cranking up the air conditioning. Pumping in that cooled air also increases electricity use, and especially so in countries where people are just beginning to make heavy use of the electrical grid. Case in point: China, where researchers find that climate change will significantly escalate electricity consumption.

“China is now the largest economy in the world, and their electricity sector is probably the largest single place where policy changes will affect greenhouse gas emissions,” said William Pizer, an expert in public and environmental policy at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who led the new research.

The New York Times editorial board says that President Donald Trump is literally endangering the entire planet with his rolling back of the Obama administration’s climate agenda.

The NYTimes’ editorial, titled “Trump Imperils the Planet,” comes as the print edition published a 12-page special section on the “far-reaching and potentially devastating” consequences of Trump’s environmental policies.

The NYTimes’ editorial board members wrote the United Nations agreeing to rules to implement the Paris Agreement “was a hugely dispiriting event and a fitting coda to one of the most discouraging years in recent memory for anyone who cares about the health of the planet.”

Much about 2019 is uncertain. But a few things are pretty much guaranteed, including the following:

Government debt will rise at an accelerating rate

Like a life-long dieter who finally gives up and decides to eat himself to death, the US is now committed to trillion-dollar deficits for as far as the eye can see. And that’s – get this – assuming no recession in the coming decade. During the next downturn that trillion will become two or more, but in 2019 another trillion-plus is guaranteed.

HONG KONG (AP) — A Chinese researcher claims that he helped make the world’s first genetically edited babies — twin girls born this month whose DNA he said he altered with a powerful new tool capable of rewriting the very blueprint of life.

If true, it would be a profound leap of science and ethics.

A U.S. scientist said he took part in the work in China, but this kind of gene editing is banned in the United States because the DNA changes can pass to future generations and it risks harming other genes.

Federal prosecutors in New York accused two Chinese nationals of conducting an “extensive” hacking campaign over more than a decade in association with Chinese state security officials, allegedly infiltrating 45 U.S. companies and government agencies in an effort to steal intellectual property and other data.

In an indictment unsealed in federal court in Manhattan, Zhu Hua and Zhang Shilong were accused of conspiracy to commit computer intrusions. Their group is known in the cyber security community as Advanced Persistent Threat 10, according to prosecutors.

Experts are calling for the government to return to cutting capacity after policy reversal, reports Feng Hao

CoalSwarm published a report on September 26 warning that 259 gigawatts of coal power capacity – equivalent to the entire coal power fleet of the United States – is being built in China despite government policies restricting new builds.

Will this year’s sudden leap in demand for power end China’s two-year policy of reducing coal-power capacity? (Image: V.T. Polywoda）